Os Imortais

"Os Imortais" is indeed a very competently made heist movie that brings together a consistent cast and a captivating story. It deals with the inability of war veterans to resume their old life after they've been trained to discard their emotions and act like killing machines only to be later unable to readapt to their old life. Crime becomes the only thing they can be good at and they reconvene their old group for a robbery. Sadly, despite some very effective scenes near the end, this human aspects take a back seat to the investigational thriller it mostly is. The casting managed to fit in the same movie a wide array of well known Portuguese (and not only since Polanski's wife Emanuelle Seigner also stars) actors and TV personalities ranging from the extremely successful Joaquim de Almeida and Nicolau Breyner to up and coming young comedians like Maria Rueff, Carla Salgueiro and Rui Unas playing against character. Certainly worth a view or two.

Well, this is just an excellent movie from Vasconcellos. The characters are very well worked out, the actors are very good, especially Unas and Breyner. Towards the middle the film seems to become a little slow, but drama soon picks up again until the end.

The exorcism of the African colonial war, where about one million Portuguese fought in the sixties and early seventies, is yet to be completed, but no doubt this film is an important contribution to the process. It depicts whit dark humor, disenchantment and a strange sadness the difficult lives that virtually all Portuguese had in the years after the war: those who fought in Africa; their relatives and friends in Europe; and those who lived in the colonies and had to return.

Fantastic Portuguese movie. One of the best ever made in my country. Congratulations to the director António-Pedro Vasconcelos that made his lifetime masterpiece, i think, and to a fabulous cast. Nicolau Breyner and Paula Mora at their best.

Breyner proved to be one of the best Portuguese actors of all time.

I've also liked the performance of Rui Unas. It was a surprise due to that it was is debut in the film industry.

A small detail in the film caught my attention: In the jacket of inspector Malarranha was a small pin of SL Benfica that is a very big soccer club in Portugal and that the director is a big fan, and so am I :).

With this film quality people will come more to the movies to see Portuguese films, for sure.

With a big, big cast, full of famous portuguese actors, Vasconcelos goes back to the crime and shows us a country in the mid 80's, ready to begin looking forward but still too much attached to its memories of war in Africa. 5 bad men from the army return to Portugal, but they're not yet ready to fit he social scheme, and so start to get involved with drug dealing, arms, and a lot of bruises to women. One inspector, at the end of his career, will be the only one to get close to the truth... but will he get there in time? A movie that brilliantly uses a past of TV images to tell parts of the story and a movie that reflects the cinema in Portugal, placing the past each time more in the past.

Normally when you see a movie of which you had read the book you get disappointed, because the movie cannot contain everything that the book has, although in this case that doesn't happen cause the movie is not just an attempt of put into a movie the story of the book, it really is more than just that, if you read the book you'll see that there are many many different changes from the story of the book to the movie, its almost like you've read a book that contains the same characters but in a somehow different story, so that's the first reason why I think this is a really good movie, but there are others, like the great screen play, the really good cast and others, although I think that the adaptation of the story is really good.